Hallidays revenge:

revolutions and International Relations

GEORGE LAWSON
*
International Afairs : (ao) oo;o
ao The Author(s). International Anairs ao The Royal Institute of International Anairs. Published by Blackwell
Publishing Ltd, ,ooo Garsington Road, Oxford o, au, UK and ,o Main Street, Malden, MA oa,, USA.
In many ways, Fred Halliday would have enjoyed ao. In particular, the events
of the Arab Spring demonstrated the continuing vitality of two aspects of his
approach to International Relations (IR): rst, the centrality of revolutions to
world anairs; and second, the conviction that inhabitants of Muslim-majority
states were motivated by the same basic concerns as other peoples around the
world: state power and legitimate authority; inequality, unemployment and
corruption; freedom, justice and rights. At the same time, Halliday would have
been dismayed by other aspects of ao: the easy turn to bellicosity by both
western powers and local elites; the short-sighted commentary of those more
concerned with the role of Facebook than with the mobilizing power of labour
movements, political parties and social movements; and the ways in which the
collapse into civil war in Libya exposed mistakes made by an institution he cared
about deeply: the London School of Economics.

In many ways, therefore, ao

was the year of Fred Hallidays revenge. Without his presence, our knowledge of
these eventsand of international relations more broadlyis much diminished.
Revolution was perhaps the issue Halliday cared about most, a conviction
stemming from his wider appreciation of modernity as the starting point for
social-scientic enquirya common position in most disciplines, but less so in
IR. Halliday saw nothing inevitable about a world built on dynamics of coercion
and resistance, and on historical accident as well as broader determinations. As
such, he saw contemporary international relations not as an iron cage but as a
rubber cage onering some degree of plastic control for its actors.
a
Revolution
was central to this understanding of plastic control, representing the most exten-
sive means by which the oppressed rose up against conditions of servitude. In this
*
This is one of a group of articles in this issue in honour of the life and work of the late Fred Halliday, and was
rst presented at a study group held on a May ao at Chatham House. My thanks to Caroline Soper for the
invitation to take part in the group and to all the participants for their comments and contributions. Particular
thanks are onered to Amnon Aran, Barry Buzan and Roland Dannreuther, who served as thoughtful, probing
discussants at the reading group; their comments and suggestions substantially improved the nal version of
this article.

The LSEs dimculties arose, in large part, from gifts provided by the Qadha Foundation for the schools work
on global governance. Hallidays dissenting note to the LSEs Council urging the rejection of these gifts
can be found at http://www.opendemocracy.net/fred-halliday/memorandum-to-lse-council-on-accepting-
grant-from-qadda-foundation, accessed May ao.
a
Fred Halliday, International relations: a critical introduction (unpublished MS), p. ,o.
George Lawson
oo
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article I unpack Hallidays approach to revolution, provide a balance sheet of its
successes and shortcomings, and oner an extension of his argument in the form of
ideal-typical anatomies of revolution. This, in turn, provides the means by which
to assess the place of revolution in the contemporary world.
Revolution and International Relations
Like Hannah Arendt, Halliday saw war and revolution as the two master processes
of the twentieth century.
,
Although IR paid due attention to the former, Halliday
argued, there was no equivalent interest in revolution: no Cromwell Professor
of Revolutionary Studies; no Paine Institute for the Study of Revolutionary
Change; indeed, very little study of revolution at all.
,
Halliday sought to rescue
revolution from the complacent rejection of conservative theorists, particularly
after the collapse of the Soviet Union. As he wrote, there are few things less
becoming to the study of human anairs than the complacency of a triumphal age.

However, Halliday was equally determined to move beyond the romanticized
celebration of blood, mendacity and coercion onered by uncritical supporters of
revolution.
o
For Halliday, although revolutions were often heroic, they were also
cynical. And for all their power to create novel social orders, revolutions were also
deeply destructive.
;
Halliday wrote extensively on revolution, coming to see it as the sixth great
power of the modern era, equivalent in inuence to the pentarchy which Marx
saw as dominating international relations during the nineteenth century.

There
were four main reasons for this assessment. First, revolution onered an alterna-
tive periodization of the modern international order, recalibrating the sixteenth
century as a time of political and ideological struggle unleashed by the European
Reformations, refocusing the seventeenth century on the upheavals which
followed the Dutch Revolt and the English Revolution, recentring the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries on the Atlantic revolutions of France, America and Haiti,
and understanding the short twentieth century as one in which the primary logic
was the challengeand collapseof the Bolshevik Revolution and its Third
World inheritors.
Second, Halliday saw revolutions as having causes rooted fundamentally in
international processes: the comparative weakening of certain states vis--vis their
rivals, the uneven and combined spread of modern capitalism, the removal of
support from regional or global hegemons, and the transnational spread of ideas.
,
Hannah Arendt, On revolution (London: Penguin, ,o,), p. . This section of the article draws on Alejandro
Cols and George Lawson, Fred Halliday: achievements, ambivalences, openings, Millennium: Journal of
International Studies ,,: a, aoo, pp. a,.
,
Fred Halliday, Rethinking International Relations (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, ,,,), ch. o.

Fred Halliday, Revolution and world politics (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, ,,,), p. .
o
Fred Halliday, Revolutionary internationalism and its perils, in John Foran, David Lane and Andreja
Zivkovic, eds, Revolution in the making of the modern world (London: Routledge, aoo;), pp. oo.
;
Although Halliday was never uncritical of the destructive tendencies of revolution, his views did change over
the years, in keeping with his general transition from revolutionary socialist to critical liberal. For more on
this transition, see Cols and Lawson, Fred Halliday, p. a,a.

Karl Marx, The European war, New York Daily Tribune, a Feb. ,.
Hallidays revenge
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As he noted, conjunctural crises of international order, featuring a breakdown of
extant hierarchies, often pregured revolutionary epochs. In this way, the rise of
Mikhail Gorbachev, the withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan and the
removal of the military guarantee for client states at the end of the ,os had a
decisive impact on the collapse of communism in Central and Eastern Europe. In
similar vein, the invasion of Spain by Napoleons forces in o provided scope for
anti-colonial revolutions to emerge in Latin America. Such challenges, Halliday
argued, were often met by international counter-revolution and, subsequently,
war. Revolutions were formed within an international context and had, in turn, a
formative inuence on the make-up of the international order. Halliday, like John
Dunn, argued that there are no domestic revolutions.
,
Third, Halliday took seriously the major claim of revolutionaries: that because
the international system (whether understood as capitalist, imperialist or a mixture
of the two) was the fundamental source of their oppression, the legitimacy of
revolutions rested on establishing a novel, more emancipatory system in its place.
As a result, revolutionary states saw their struggles not as contained within the
limits of state borders, but as transcending existing boundaries. Marx and Engels,
for example, thought that communism could not exist as a local event. The prole-
tariat can only exist on the world-historical plane, just as communism, its activity,
can only have a world-historical existence.
o
Lenin makes this point starkly: global
class, global party, global revolution (Weltklasse, Weltpartei, Weltrevolution).

And
Che Guevara turned it into a battle-cry of anti-imperialism in his Message to the
People of the World:
How close and bright would the future appear if two, three, many Vietnams owered on
the face of the globe what dinerence do the dangers to a human being or people matter
when what is at stake is the destiny of humanity. Our every action is a battle cry against
imperialism and a call for the unity of the peoples Wherever death may surprise us, let
it be welcome.
a
The centrality of international oppression to the analysis of revolutionaries,
Halliday argued, meant that revolutionary movements ran counter to the ground
rules of international order (sovereignty, international law and diplomacy),
proclaiming ideals of universal society and world revolution. Revolutions
challenged international order in a number of ways, ranging from disrupting
existing patterns of trade and alliances to questioning underlying rules, norms
and principles. To take one example, the challenge of the Bolshevik Revolution
was at once short term (prompting the withdrawal of Russian forces from the
First World War), medium term (in the provision of support for allied states) and
long term (in the establishment of a systemic alternative to market democracy). As
Halliday argued, revolutionary states forced Great Powers to act by challenging
,
John Dunn, Western political theory in the face of the future (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ,;,), p. ,o.
o
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German ideology (London: Lawrence & Wishart, ,;o; rst publ. ,o),
pp. ,o;.

Cited in Halliday, Revolutionary internationalism, p. ;o.

a
Che Guevara, Create two, three, many Vietnams, in Mara del Carmen Ariet Garca, ed., Global Justice (New
York: Ocean, aooa; rst publ. ,o), p. oa.
George Lawson
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their credibility as Great Powers. In other words, in order to justify their position
at the apex of the international system, Great Powers were required to quell
revolutions.
,
As such, counter-revolution was not an instrumental reaction to
moments of revolutionary upheaval, but a process hard-wired into the fundamen-
tals of international relations itself.
,
The fourth international component of revolution lay, for Halliday, in its close
association with war. As Stephen Walt notes, revolutions intensify the prospect of
war in three ways.

First, revolutions provide a window of opportunity for states

to improve their position vis--vis other states, for example by seizing territory,
attacking a state previously protected by the old regime, or generating conict
between the revolutionary state and its rivals. In particular, because revolutionary
regimes are beset by civil strife and elite fracture, other states may seize the chance
to attack the revolutionary regime. Second, this window of opportunity gener-
ates spirals of suspicion as the uncertainty produced by the revolution heightens
levels of insecurity that, in turn, raise perceptions of threat.
o
Finally, revolu-
tionary states seek to export their revolution, both as a way of shoring up their
fragile position at home and because of their ideological commitment to an alter-
native international order. Concomitantly, counter-revolutionary states assume
both that revolution will spread unless it is strangled in its crib, and that revolu-
tion will be relatively easy to reverse.
;
This perverse combination of insecurity
and overcondence heightens the prospects of interstate conict.

By increasing
uncertainty and fear, by altering capabilities and by raising threat perceptions,
revolutionary states begin a process which, quite often, leads to war.
For Halliday, therefore, revolutions are always international events: revolu-
tions have international causes, revolutionaries seek to export their revolution
abroad, and revolutions share a close relationship with both counter-revolution
and war. In this sense, revolutionary states exhibit a particular form of revolu-
tionary sovereignty, one which legitimizes domestic autarchy and international
intervention simultaneously. However, as Halliday recognized, the enects of
revolutions on the international system are uneven. Hence, while the Bolshevik
Revolution ushered in over o years of conict between state socialism and market
democracy, it is dimcult to see many large-scale ramications that arose from
the Mexican or Ethiopian revolutions. At the same time, there is a paradox at
the heart of the relationship between revolutionary states and the international
system: revolutionary states must establish relations with other states and coexist
,
Often this reaction took the form of containment, as espoused by the former US Ambassador to the Soviet
Union, George Kennan: if you go out and light a re in a eld, it begins to spread a little bit, but it has died
out where you lit it. It burns only on the edgesand so it is with Russian communism (cited in Halliday,
Rethinking, p. a). Both Kennan and Halliday argued that the coercive overthrow of a revolutionary regime
was a rare event. In fact, the latter was fond of quoting a headline from The Times published during the Iran
Iraq war: Never invade a revolution.
,
A point also made in Nick Bisley, Counter-revolution, order and international politics, Review of International
Studies ,o: , aoo,, pp. ,,o,.

Stephen Walt, Revolution and war (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, ,,;).
o
Walt, Revolution and war, p. ,,.
;
Walt, Revolution and war, p. ,,.

Walt, Revolution and war, p. ,o.

Hallidays revenge
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with the systems rules, laws and institutions, even while professing to reject these
practices. As such, pressures to conform provide a counterweight to claims of
self-reliance and international contestation. Despite challenging existing patterns
of inter action and hierarchy, revolutionary states play their part in reproducing
regimes governing trade, alliance formation and security. Indeed, the often
tenuous nature of revolutionary regimes, besieged from without and within by
counter- revolutionary forces, means that they take claims to domestic sovereignty
and state security seriously. As such, they often serve to strengthen the very states
system that they seek to undermine. Although this is some way short of domesti-
cation or socialization, in order to function as states revolutionary states give up
many of their revolutionary aims.
,
Halliday did not merely see revolution as an important topic for IR; he also
thought that IR had much to oner sociological and historical accounts of revolu-
tion. First, international factors (defeat in war, the vicissitudes of the market and
shifting alliance structures) often precipitated and prompted revolutionary crisis.
Second, international actors played a major role in encouraging revolutions via
arms, aid and the power of example. Finally, revolutionary foreign policies were
committed to the export of revolution, albeit with mixed success. As such, IR
scholarship aided the general study of revolution by making apparent its modular
features: the period of grace onered to revolutionary regimes as foreign powers
assessed its challenge; active confrontation as this challenge was met by counter-
revolution and war; and nally, long-term accommodation as both sides of the
conict took part in symbiotic, if unequal, exchanges.
ao
The history of inter-
national relations also demonstrated that, for all the voluntarist delusions of
revolutionaries from Trotsky to Guevara, the particular contexts in which revolu-
tions emerged meant that emulation was, at best, a remote possibility.
a
A provisional balance sheet
What can be said of Hallidays analysis of revolution? In compiling a provisional
balance sheet of his work on revolution, it is possible to highlight three strengths
and two weaknesses. First, the strengths.
Halliday was right to see revolutions not as static objects of analysis but as
processes which change in form and content across time and placethere is no
supra-sensible revolutionary form from which empirical references can be drawn.
Revolutions have been conducted by nationalists in Algeria, communists in
,
A point made in David Armstrong, Revolution and world order (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ,,,). As
Halliday often pointed out, it is revolutionary states themselves that often nationalize the international
dimensions of their struggle. In ,ao, the Soviet leadership laid down a conditions for membership of the
Comintern; in ,a, delity to the Soviet Union became a requirement of membership; and during the
,,os and ,,os, the Soviet Union instituted a policy of socialism in one country, dissolving the Third
International.
ao
Halliday, Rethinking, ch. o.
a
Halliday, Revolution and world politics, p. a,. On the cognitive shortcuts which lead revolutionaries to
overestimate the possibilities of emulation, see Kurt Weyland, The dinusion of revolution: , in Europe
and Latin America, International Organization o,: ,, aoo,, pp. ,,,a,.
George Lawson
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Afghanistan, Russia, China and Vietnam, radical military groups in Egypt and
Ethiopia, peasants in Mexico and Islamists in Iran. At the same time, the concept
of revolution exists in every major language group in the world: a full study of
its etymology would need to take in the Greek concepts of epanastasis (revolution),
the Arabic terms inqilab (to rotate) and thaura (revolution), the notions of mered
(rebellion), hitkomemut (uprising), meri (revolt) and kesher (plot) in classical Hebrew,
the Chinese word geming (change of life, fate or destiny) and the Latin verb revol-
vere (to return).
aa
Deeper probing into the European meaning of the term reveals
further diversity. In ancient Greece, the idea of revolution was linked to a circular
movement contained within Aristotles trinity of democracy, oligarchy and
tyranny. During the Middle Ages, revolutions continued to be seen as recurrent
or circular processes, the turning of wheels rather than fundamental ruptures.
a,

The late medieval astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus, for example, titled one of his
major works On the revolution of celestial spheres (De revolutionibus orbium coeles-
tium), using the concept of revolution to illustrate the elliptic motions of planets.
It was only during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in part owing to
the work of Montesquieu, Voltaire and Rousseau, that the concept of revolu-
tion became more circumscribed, coming to mean a radical break from existing
conditions. In this way, the English Civil War of the o,os was reinterpreted as a
revolution during the eighteenth century, as was the Dutch Revolt and, later on,
the American War of Independence. After the French Revolution, the concept of
revolution was universalized, naturalized and, ultimately, mythologized around
the French experience.
a,
And it is the French model of revolutionas the
inevitable, nal reckoning of historical progress itself (la rvolution en permanence,
as Proudhon put it)that has come to serve as the principal understanding of
revolution in the modern era. Halliday both recognized the diverse meanings
of revolution and did much to enhance appreciation of the multiple forms that
revolutions take.
Second, Halliday highlighted the close relationship between revolution and the
making of the modern international order. As he noted (following Martin Wight),
over half of the last oo years have featured some kind of conict between revolu-
tionary and counter-revolutionary states.
a
Although no revolution has delivered
in full on its promises, revolutions have bought dramatic changes in their wake.
The French Revolution, for example, introduced modern notions of nationalism
and popular sovereignty, concepts of left and right, the metric system, and a
conict between absolutism and republicanism that dominated European politics
during the nineteenth century. Other revolutions can claim almost as great an
impact: the Russian Revolution pioneered a model of state-led industrialization
and social development that proved a powerful draw for many states around the
world during the twentieth century, just as the Cuban Revolution stood as the
aa
Halliday, Revolution and world politics, pp. a,,. Thanks to Amnon Aran, Katerina Dalacoura and Chris
Hughes for sharpening my understanding of these concepts.
a,
Arendt, On revolution, pp. ,a,.
a,
Krishan Kumar, : revolutionary ideas and ideals (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, aoo), p. ;.
a
Martin Wight, Power politics (Leicester: Leicester University Press, ,,; rst publ. ,,o), p. ,a.
Hallidays revenge
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exemplar of the possibilities of sustained insurgency and guerrilla warfare, the
Chinese Revolution as demonstrating the radical potential of the peasantry, and
the Iranian Revolution as the event which unleashed a militant form of Islam onto
the world stage. For its part, the ,a Egyptian Revolution established a form
of military-led social transformation which inspired revolutionary movements in
the region during the ,os and ,oos, just as a comparable uprising served as
the linchpin for a wave of unrest in North Africa and the Middle East during
ao. Revolutions, by virtue of the example they set in overcoming apparently
insurmountable forces, and in generating substantial changes both to the texture
of their home societies and in the wider world, have played a central role in the
development of the modern world. Indeed, revolutionsand the avoidance of
revolutions, whether through autocratic modernization, reform programmes or
counter-revolutionare among the central reference points in modern world
history, less occasional punctuation marks than the very grammar of modernity
itself.
Third, as noted above, Halliday did much to highlight the international features
of revolution. Although recent revolutionary theory provides a thicker concep-
tion of the international dimensions of revolution than previous generations of
study produced, even contemporary scholarship tends to maintain a somewhat
inert account of the international, resting on the permissive context provided by
the international system,
ao
an understanding of world time as the static setting
for revolutionary epochs,
a;
or a notion of international waves which arise, for
example, through long-term demographic pressures.
a
Given this residual role for
international processes, it is hardly surprising that, quite often, empirical accounts
of revolution remain caged within domestic borders or its enects treated, as in
Barrington Moores phrase, as fortuitous circumstances.
a,
However, as Halliday
showed, the international is more than a passive backdrop to revolutionary
processes. On the contrary, international dynamics, including the destabilizing
impact of wars, the symbolic transmissions which accelerate or redirect revolu-
tions, and broader patterns of market expansion and contraction play leading roles
in revolutions. Halliday was at the vanguard of analysis which saw revolutions as
arising from multiple interactions between international processes and statesociety
dynamics.
In this way, Halliday can be seen as one of the architects of an inter-social
approach to revolutions.
,o
Such an approach starts from a simple premise: events
which take place in one country both are anected by and anect events elsewhere.
In other words, events contain an interactive, relational dynamic which necessarily
supersedes the nation-state frame. For example, the onset of the French Revolu-
tion cannot be understood unless due heed is paid to the expansionist policies of
ao
John Foran, Taking power (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, aoo).
a;
Theda Skocpol, States and social revolutions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ,;,).
a
Jack Goldstone, Revolution and rebellion in the early modern world (Berkeley: University of California Press, ,,).
a,
Barrington Moore Jr, Social origins of dictatorship and democracy (London: Penguin, ,o;), p. a,.
,o
For more on this approach, see John Hobson, George Lawson and Justin Rosenberg, Historical sociology,
in Robert Denemark, ed., The international studies encyclopaedia (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, aoo).
George Lawson
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the French state during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: between oo
and ;o, France was at war in two out of every three years.
,
This bellicosity,
a product of pressures caused by developments in rival states as well as domestic
factors, brought increased demands for taxation which, over time, engendered
factionalism in the ancien rgime. The interactive properties of intersocial relations
also anected events during the revolutionary period. For example, in late ;,a,
as the Jacobins were losing inuence to the Girondins, leading Jacobins pressured
the state into international conict. As Frances foreign campaigns went increas-
ingly badly, the Committee of Public Safety, a central site of Jacobin authority,
committed France to a process of radicalization: the Terror. In this way, domestic
political concerns induced international conict which, in turn, opened up space
for domestic polarization. The Jacobins identied the Girondins as unrevolu-
tionary traitors, speculators and hoarders, while identifying themselves as the
guardians of the revolution, a process which allowed them to institute a wave of
militancy through policies such as the leve en masse.
,a
In addition to the dynamic
roles they played in fostering both the revolutionary situation and revolutionary
trajectories in France, intersocial relations also played a key role in the outcomes
of the revolution. First, the revolutionary regime annexed the Rhineland and
Belgium, and helped to foment republican revolution in neighbouring countries,
including the Low Countries, Switzerland and Italy. Second, the revolution
prompted unrest throughout Europe, including Ireland, where a rebellion against
English rule led to war and, in oa, the Act of Union between the United
Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Third, the threat from France was met
by extensive counter-revolution in neighbouring states. In England, for example,
habeas corpus was suspended in ;,,, while legislation ranging from the Seditious
Meetings Act to the Combination Acts was introduced in order to disrupt the
spread of republicanism. Although the French did not generate an international
revolutionary party, many states acted as if they had done just that, instituting
domestic crackdowns in order to guard against the claim made by Jacque-Pierre
Brissot, a leading Girondin, that we [the French revolutionary regime] cannot be
at peace until all Europe is in ames.
,,
Hallidays work on revolution, therefore, produced a research agenda brimming
with vitality. It also left behind a series of challenges, of which two stand out.
First, in keeping with his desire to interlace normative and analytical registers,
Halliday was keen to stimulate discussion of the ethical dimensions of revolutions.
Criticizing the lack of a tradition of ius ad revolutionem or ius in revolutione which
could match debates around just war, Halliday argued that such discussion was
crucial lest revolutionary excesses be excused by those (advocates and theorists)
who saw revolution as inevitable.
,,
Questions about when it was legitimate to
,
Bailey Stone, Reinterpreting the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, aooa), pp. a,oo.
,a
Doug McAdam, Sidney Tarrow and Charles Tilly, Dynamics of contention (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, aoo,), pp. ,a,.
,,
Cited in Robert Palmer, The world revolution of the West, Political Science uarterly o,: , ,,, p. .
,,
Fred Halliday, Revolution and the international, Millennium: Journal of International Studies a,: a, ,,, pp.
a;,;.
Hallidays revenge
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take up revolutionary struggles and what methods revolutionary movements
could reasonably deploy in these struggles were, Halliday thought, central to their
assessment.
,
This agenda remains to be lled in. Second, Halliday did not engage
systematically with revolutionary theory, whether in IR or outside the discipline.
Rather, he had a tendency to move from abstract levels of analysisfor example,
the dictum (following Lenin) that revolutions took place when rulers could
not go on ruling and the ruled could no longer go on being ruledto detailed
analysis of individual cases.
,o
Some of this analysis was brilliant; but it was also
frustrating in its failure to construct a schema, however approximate, by which to
study revolutions outside their specic instantiations.
,;
Although analysis of the
rst of these shortcomings lies beyond the scope of this article, the next section
provides a partial response to the second charge.
,
Anatomies of revolution
As noted above, Fred Halliday understood that revolutions were dynamic processes
which changed in form, content and character across time and place. Indeed, the
diversity of revolutionary instances, their myriad causes and their diverse ratio-
nales precluded any sense of revolutionary singularity. As Jack Goldstone notes:
Analysts of revolution have demonstrated that economic downturns, cultures
of rebellion, dependent development, population pressures, colonial or person-
alistic regime structures, cross class coalitions, the loss of nationalist credentials,
military defection, the spread of revolutionary ideology and exemplars, and
enective leadership are all plausibly linked within multiple cases of revolution,
albeit in dinerent ways in dinerent cases.
,,
Revolutions, therefore, take place
in a range of circumstances, including when a relatively autonomous peasantry
enjoys a position of tactical freedom;
,o
when the enectiveness of the state is
reduced by economic mismanagement, military defeat or corruption;
,
or when
neighbouring states are experiencing revolutions of their own.
,a
In this sense,
revolutions arise not from xed preconditions but from the alignment of some
,
It is, however, worth noting the scholarly debate around the use of terrorism by revolutionary groups. See
e.g. Jen Goodwin, Explaining revolutionary terrorism, in Foran et al., eds, Revolution in the modern world, pp.
,,aa.
,o
V. I. Lenin, On culture and cultural revolution (Moscow: Progress, ,;o; rst publ. ,a,), p. ;,.
,;
Interestingly, Halliday worked more on Third World revolutions than he did on European revolutions. His
work on specic revolutions includes Fred Halliday, Revolution and foreign policy: the case of South Yemen,
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, aooa), and Fred Halliday and Maxine Molyneux, The Ethiopian
revolution (London: Verso, ,a). However, this point also holds for the text Halliday considered to be his
major statement on the subjectRevolution and world politics. In each of these books, irrepressible empirical
synthesis is not matched by comparable depth of theoretical insight. On this issue, see Stephen Walt, Nothing
revolutionary, Review of International Studies a;: ,, aoo, pp. o;,a.
,
For a (limited) discussion of the normative features of revolutions, see George Lawson, Anatomies of revolution
(forthcoming), introduction and ch. o.
,,
Jack Goldstone, Toward a fourth generation of revolutionary theory, Annual Review of Political Science ,, aoo,
p. ;a.
,o
Eric Wolf, Peasant wars of the twentieth century (New York: Harper, ,o,).
,
Jack Goldstone, Revolution: theoretical, comparative, and historical studies (Belmont, CA: Thomson Wadsworth,
aoo,), p. ,.
,a
Halliday, Revolution and world politics, pp. a,o,,.
George Lawson
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combination of relational dynamics. This section teases out the implications of
such an understanding of revolutions. Its basic goal is to map how particular
congurations of ideal-typied factors come together to generate historically
specic outcomes in particular cases.
,,
The task is to develop abstractions which
contain enough exibility to accommodate empirical variation, but which retain
sumcient strength for their core wagers to remain stable.
Revolutionary situations
Revolutionary situations tend to emerge in eras of international upheaval, in
which state enectiveness is threatened not just by internal processes but also by
pressures from outside: international conicts, economic crises, and shifts in
prevailing patterns of hierarchy, authority and rule.
,,
In short, revolutions thrive
in abnormal times, a point recognized vividly by Mao: There is great chaos under
Heaven; the situation is excellent. In this sense, both the breakdown of semi-
colonial monarchies at the beginning of the twentieth century and the winding
down of the Cold War at its end acted as a spur for revolutionary change. In the
case of the former, the collapse of the Persian, Ottoman, Moroccan, Mexican and
Chinese monarchies induced crisis periods in which relative anarchy fostered the
conditions for revolutionary situations to emerge.
,
In the case of the latter, as
long as revolutionaries framed their story as one of a return to normalcy, emanci-
pation from the Soviet yoke or liberation from a system whose time had passed,
so the Great Powers welcomed what had previously been outcasts into the society
of states.
States most susceptible to these openings are those on the semi-periphery of
the international system, dependent geopolitically and economically on other
states, and facing the systemic challenges of modernization, that is cycles of rapid
growth and sharp downturn. Pertinent examples include Mexico, Turkey, Iran
and Russia. Revolutionary situations emerge when the double (geopolitical and
economic) dependency of states becomes unsustainable. In other words, revolu-
tionary conditions surface in states in which the ruling regime does not cope enec-
tively with these challenges and when an opposition group emerges which oners
a viable plan for change, holds sumcient resources to provide a credible challenge
and carries the support of signicant social groupings. For example, in ,;os Iran,
the shahs regime was over-reliant on foreign backing (particularly that of the
United States), oil money and a repressive apparatus, including a secret police
that routinely used torture. A major chasm emerged between an autocratic elite,
buttressed by cronyism, and the bulk of civil society. This chasm was lled by an
alliance between the Shii clergy, who were able to organize opposition through
,,
Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, The conduct of inquiry in International Relations (Abingdon: Routledge, aoo), p. ,.
,,
There are, of course, exceptions to this point. For example, revolutions in Ethiopia, Iran and Cuba all
took place without an apparently facilitative international environment. Yet this does not mean that these
revolutions were without international causes. On this latter point, see Halliday, Revolution and world politics,
pp. ,,.
,
Eric Hobsbawm, Revolution, in Roy Porter and Mikuls Teich, eds, Revolution in history (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, ,o), p. .
Hallidays revenge
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networks of mosques, leftist groups and an urban bazaari discontented with rising
costs, high ination and new legislation which hindered their working practices.
Although these groups could agree on little in terms of a constructive revolutionary
programme, they could agree that the shah was the source of their problems.
,o

In the face of well-organized, sustained protest, the shah vacillated, hoping for
US support.
,;
In the meantime, the opposition amassed levels of material and
social capital which presented a considerable challenge to the authority of the old
regime. The legitimacy of the shahs regime collapsed, and both elites and wider
social groups came to assume that radical change was inevitable.
There are, therefore, three main points to observe in the development of
revolutionary situations. First, changes in the broad congurations of interna-
tional relations act as the overarching fuel for revolutionary changehence the
rapid increase in revolutionary movements at the end of world wars and after the
collapse of empires: changing geopolitical contexts are the crucibles in which
domestically oriented movements have the chance to redene their positions.
Second, some regimes are more vulnerable than others to these shifting inter-
national dynamics, most notably personalistic regimes which are based on the
authority of a single individual and authoritarian states which are despotically
strong but infrastructurally weak. This point is discussed further below. Third,
revolutionary situations emerge from politicalcoercive crisis in which the legit-
imacy of the old regime collapses and a viable alternative is onered; symbolic
crisis in which alternative ideas, a widespread perception of failure and a belief
that things are getting intolerably worse induces the possibility of revolutionary
conict; and relative economic crisis. On this last point, consider again the case of
Iran. During the mid-,;os a mini-recession meant the withdrawal of a number of
welfare programmes, the freezing of wages, the suspension of state subsidies to the
clergy and increased taxation demands. At the same time, the regime established
price controls and passed an Anti-Proteering Act which reduced the capacity
of urban bazaaris to keep prices in line with ination. During ,;; over oo,ooo
shopkeepers in Tehran (half of all the shopkeepers in the city) were investigated
under price control and/or anti-proteering legislation.
,
During the same year,
over ao,ooo bazaaris were deported from Irans major cities to remote areas.
,,
In Iran, as in other revolutionary situations, pressures built up over the long
term through the appeal of immanent political ideologies (such as Islamism) and
cycles of protest (such as the ,oo Constitutional Revolution, the ,, coup against
President Mosaddeq and the White Revolution of the ,oos). These long-term
pressures were augmented by the emergence of a revolutionary coalition in the
form of an accommodation between the Liberation Movement (an Islamic nation-
alist organization created by Mehdi Bazargan), the pro-Moscow Tudeh Party,
guerrilla organizations (such as Mujahedin-e Khalq and Fedayeen-e Islam) and
,o
Misagh Parsa, State, ideology and revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, aooo), p. ao.
,;
Nikki Keddie, Can revolutions be predicted? Can their causes be understood? in Nikki Keddie, ed., Debating
revolution (New York: New York University Press, ,,), pp. ,ao.
,
Parsa, State, ideology and revolution, p. aoo.
,,
Parsa, State, ideology and revolution, p. aoo.
George Lawson
o;
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the United Islamic Societies. During ,;; and ,; transformative events (such
as the Black Friday massacre, in which police killed hundreds of protesters) and
suddenly imposed grievances (such as the removal of state subsidies to the clergy)
meant that the opposition became increasingly vociferous in its demands.
o
By the
time the regime awoke to the scale of the revolutionary challenge and deployed
its despotic power, in late ,;, it was too lateits legitimacy and authority had
been fatally undermined.
Revolutionary trajectories
Revolutionary trajectories take their character from the type of social order in
which the revolution takes place. In democratic orders, polarization is limited by
the presence of institutional sites for the resolution of conicts. But in more rigid
social orders, where there are few institutional sites through which to manage
conict, the social order is often compelled to accommodate rival movementsas
Trotsky noted, the history of revolution is rst of all a history of the forcible entry
of the masses into the realm of rulership over their own destiny.

In these states,
early reforms by an incumbent regime can decompress revolutionary pressures by
splitting opposition, moderating public opinion and isolating extremists.
a
This
was the (apparently successful) strategy pursued by a number of regimes in North
Africa and the Middle East, most notably Saudi Arabia and Morocco, during the
ao uprisings. But, as Alexis de Tocqueville rst noted, reform programmes are
a risky strategy, providing space for opposition movements to thrivehence
the escalation of protests against Syrian, Yemeni and Jordanian rulers following
measures intended to defuse demonstrations.
,
For those who have been ghting
for scarce resources with little prospect of success, the chance to operate in more
amenable circumstances means an opportunity to spread messages, organize resis-
tance and build alliances more widely. In such conditions, if a strong revolu-
tionary movement exists alongside a weak regime, reform may escalate rather
than defuse protests.
The rst determinant in how revolutionary trajectories unfold, therefore, is
state enectiveness.
,
This, in turn, is correlated to the type of regime which is in
power and, in particular, its capacity to institutionalize dissent. As Jen Goodwin
notes, although revolutions are a response to economic exploitation, they
are conditioned more by political oppression than by concerns about inequal-
ity.

Indeed, what ties revolutionary movements together is not class-based

solidarity (on the contrary, class-based antagonisms often hinder the formation
o
McAdam et al., Dynamics of contention, pp. aoao,.

Leon Trotsky, The history of the Russian Revolution (London: Pluto, ,,;; rst publ. ,,a), p. ;.
a
Lawrence Stone, Theories of revolution, World Politics : a, ,oo, p. o;.
,
Alexis de Tocqueville, The ancien rgime and the French Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ,,;
rst publ. a).
,
On this point, see Goldstone, Toward a fourth generation; Jack Goldstone, Robert Bates, Ted Robert Gurr,
Michael Lustik, Monty G. Marshall, Jay Ulfelder, Mark Woodward, A global model for forecasting political
instability, American Journal of Political Science ,: , aoo, pp. ,oao.

Jen Goodwin, No other way out (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, aoo).
Hallidays revenge
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of revolutionary coalitions) but the fact of political exclusionin short, injus-
tice trumps poverty.
o
Unsurprisingly, therefore, states are the basic targets of
revolutionary movementsthey are the means by which local grievances, revolts
and rebellions are politicized. Goodwin dinerentiates between authoritarian states
(which contain a degree of autonomy from civil society, but not from core elites)
and Sultanist regimes (personalist, exclusionary dictatorships in which power is
vested in the hands of a single ruler).
;
Sultanist regimes incubate grievances by
foreclosing opportunities to reform the political order, thereby turning moderates
into radicals and unifying opposition forces.

During times of state weakening,

such as demonstrably fraudulent or deeply contested elections, the state often
uses its despotic power in arbitrary ways. However, the use of state violence only
serves to escalate tensions. Because the state is disembedded from both society
and alternative elites, opposition groups are able to mobilize beyond its reaches.
Thereafter, if the ruling elite fractures, revolution becomes a plausible scenario.
,

Crucial factors in elite fracture include the evident corruption of a personal-
istic regime. Hosni Mubarak and his family, for example, are reported to have
accumulated tens of billions of dollars of personal wealth through rents on omcial
contracts.
oo
In general, the regimes most likely to fracture are those that have an
excessively personalistic form of rule and are under the subordination of foreign
powershence the vulnerability of Iran in ,;, and Egypt in ao. These states
are suspended in a void, polarized between an arbitrary state and a quicksand
society.
o
When alternative voices are excluded from the political process, all
forms of opposition serve to weaken the states legitimacy. In these circumstances,
reform programmes initiated by the old regime hasten rather than contain the
development of revolution.
The second determinant of revolutionary trajectories is the part played by the
coercive apparatus, which contains something close to a veto power over revolu-
tionary uprisings. Once again, regime type matters. Revolution is most likely
in autocratic states where the coercive apparatus is contained within a single
command structure. However, authoritarian regimes in which coercive power is
parcelled out between the armed forces, the interior ministry, the secret police
and paramilitaries are also fragile.
oa
Although political ideologies can stabi-
lize regimes by promoting elite cohesion, processes ranging from economic
downturns to elections can prompt elite defections, particularly if these processes
o
Goodwin, No other way out, p. a,; Parsa, State, ideology and revolution, p. .
;
Goodwin borrows the term Sultanism from Max Weber. Weber saw Sultanism as a subset of patrimonialism
which was, in turn, a subset of traditional authority. See Max Weber, Economy and society (Berkeley: University
of California Press, ,;; rst publ. ,aa).

Goodwin, No other way out, p. ;;; Parsa, State, ideology and revolution, pp. o.
,
The importance of elite fracture is often traced to Plato, who argued that, while a united ruling class can
resist popular threats, a disunited elite opens up the space for opposition to emerge and mobilize: The
constitution cannot be upset so long as that class [the ruling class] are of one mind. See Plato, Republic
(London: Wordsworth, ,,;), p. aoa.
oo
Jack Goldstone, Understanding the revolutions of ao, Foreign Afairs ,o: ,, ao, p. .
o
Tim McDaniel, Autocracy, modernization and revolution in Russia and Iran (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, ,,), pp. oo, aa,.
oa
Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way, Competitive authoritarianism: hybrid regimes after the Cold War (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, aoo).
George Lawson
oo
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weaken the patronage system propping up the coalition.
o,
In this way, authori-
tarian strongmen, such as General Suharto in Indonesia, sow the seeds of their
own demise by allowing powerful sites of institutional authority to emerge which
are subsequently used as power bases for rival factions.
o,
Elite fracture, in turn,
provides the space for protests to both widen and deepen. As the infrastructural
power of authoritarian states is weakened, they are forced to rely increasingly on
despotic power. This, in turn, tends to radicalize the opposition and make revolu-
tion more rather than less likely.
As Perry Anderson notes, revolutions have the capacity to break the states
monopoly on the legitimate use of violence in three ways: rst, by delegitimizing
the authority of the old regime to such an extent that the coercive apparatus
will no longer employ violence against its own people (as in Iran in ,;, after
mass protests enectively paralysed the royal army); second, by seizing power and
thereby generating a condition of dual sovereignty (as in Russia during ,;);
and third, by using a regional stronghold as a base by which to conduct long-
term guerrilla campaigns (as the Chinese communists did in Yanan).
o
There is
a degree of contingency to such dynamics. For example, the decision by Czech
leaders in ,, not to call in the army during the general strike which preceded
the Velvet Revolution contrasts starkly with the decision by the Chinese polit-
buro to employ the army against student protesters in Tiananmen Square in June
,,, a policy which helped to defuse large-scale opposition to the regime. It is
now common knowledge that in East Germany Erich Honecker came close to
deploying the armed forces against protesters, until Mikhail Gorbachev, among
others, persuaded him otherwise. In Romania, Nicolae Ceauescus elite force, the
Securitate, failed to defend the leadership against a determined uprising. Neither
China nor Romania experienced revolutionary transformations, yet East Germany
did. In each case, it was a particular conguration of elite action, domestic opposi-
tion and external agency that determined the path of the insurrection. And in
each case, the role of the coercive apparatus was germane to the path taken by the
revolutionary challenge.
The third determinant in revolutionary trajectories is the formation of a close-
knit identity within the revolutionary movement. Revolutions feature the forma-
tion of multi-class coalitions in which diverse strands of protest are linked through
decisive leadership, common ideological frameworks and shared narratives, often
inspired by stories of national awakening. In this way, ,ooo committed Sandini-
stas were joined by a broad front made up of intellectuals, priests, labour activists
and some business leaders during the latter stages of the Nicaraguan Revolu-
tion.
oo
Revolutionary protest identities tend to be a promiscuous bricolage of
the indigenous and the transnational: protesters in Tehran in ,;, wore Che
Guevara T-shirts, just as revolutionaries around the world sang local variants of
o,
Stephen Hanson, Post-imperial democracies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, aoo).
o,
Dan Slater, Ordering power: contentious politics and authoritarian leviathans in Southeast Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, aoo), pp. ,o,.
o
Perry Anderson, Two revolutions, New Left Review, no. o, Jan.Feb. aoo, pp. ,,o.
oo
Robert Dix, Why revolutions succeed and fail, Polity o: ,, ,,, p. ,,,.
Hallidays revenge
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the Internationale.
o;
These eclectic tropes provide repertoires which can be
mobilized in order to legitimate and sustain the revolutionary struggle.
o
Lying
behind these repertoires are stories, vehicles of mobilization which, as Eric Selbin
argues, serve as tools of connection between everyday life and collective protest.
Selbin highlights four such revolutionary narratives: civilizing and democratizing
revolutions (such as the American War of Independence); social revolutions (as
in France, Russia and Cuba); freedom and liberation revolutions (as in Haiti and
Mexico); and lost and forgotten revolutions (such as the Green Corn Rebellion
of Oklahoma). The rst two categories are elite histories, foundational stories
told by the victors; the latter two are stories from the periphery, representing
the struggle of slaves, serfs and sans-culottes to free themselves from bondage.
o,

Because revolutions are polarizing processes featuring mutually incompatible
claims over a particular polity, revolutionary adversaries are locked into appar-
ently irreconcilable narratives. In other words, stories are used to legitimize both
sides of the strugglethey are the social technologies of revolutionary struggles.
Revolutionary trajectories, therefore, feature the interaction of social technol-
ogies which bind groups together within a context of weakening state enec-
tiveness in which control of the coercive apparatus is the prime determinant.
Revolutionary trajectories are neither inevitable nor miraculous, neither the
necessary consequence of particular structural alignments nor solely the intended
consequence of participants strategic behaviour. In short, there is rhyme to the
revolutionary unreason. Key to understanding their trajectories are three factors:
rst, levels of state enectiveness, which are in turn correlated with regime type;
second, the hold of an elite over the coercive apparatus; and third, the organi-
zation of opposition into a coherent revolutionary movement through the use
of social technologies ranging from revolutionary stories to networks of social
movements, political parties, labour organizations and peasant associations.
Revolutionary outcomes
The minimum condition of revolutionary success is the takeover and establish-
ment of state power or its equivalent by revolutionaries, that is, of institutions
that are sumciently robust to appear xed and unbreakable.
;o
John Foran puts this
well, dening revolutionary success as a revolutionary party coming to power and
holding it long enough to initiate a process of deep structural transformation.
;
In
short, successful revolutions should be understood as cases where a revolutionary
regime takes control of the principal means of production, of violence and of
information in a society. By this reckoning, the immediate condition of revolu-
tionary success occurs when the new regime is no longer directly challenged by
o;
Eric Selbin, Zapatas white horse and Ches beret: theories on the future of revolution, in John Foran, ed.,
The future of revolution (London: Zed, aoo,), p. o.
o
Charles Tilly, Regimes and repertoires (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, aooo).
o,
Eric Selbin, Revolution, rebellion, resistance (London: Zed, aoo), p. ;.
;o
Hobsbawm, Revolution, p. a,.
;
Foran, Taking power, p. .
George Lawson
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domestic rivalsa point marked, for example, by the end of the civil war in
Russia in ,a.
The maximum condition of revolutionary victory is the institutionalization
of a new political, economic and symbolic order, what Eric Hobsbawm calls a new
framework for historical development.
;a
It is, therefore, essential to wait at least a
generation after the end of the revolutionuntil the children of the revolution
emerge onto the public sceneto assess the success, or otherwise, of a revolu-
tion. Only if the principal institutions in a society are systemically transformed can
a revolution be considered successful.
;,
Not everything changes after revolutions.
Some institutional features of the old order are so entrenched they cannot be
altered; other measures are blocked by surviving members of the opposition; and
there are some things that revolutionaries do not attempt to change. Nevertheless,
revolutions represent fundamental transformations in a societys principal institu-
tional congurations.
The transformative outcomes of revolutions apply to both a states domestic
and its international relations. Domestically, revolutions tend to lead to the
formation of stronger states, both despotically and infrastructurally. In Iran,
for example, nearly ,,ooo people were executed and over a,ooo dissidents were
killed in clashes between the ulema and its opponents between ,;, and ,,. The
claim made by George Savile, marquess of Halifax, some ,oo years ago still stands
as a sound assessment of the impact of revolutions on those who make them:
When people contend for their liberty, they seldom get anything by their victory
but new masters.
;,
However, it is not only through despotic power that states
increase their authority after revolutions; states are also the principal vehicles for
projects of social transformation, through policies ranging from nationalization
and collectivization to land reform and redistribution. In Cuba, for instance, over
,oo laws were enacted in ,, alone.
;
Material transformations of this kind are
buttressed and reinforced by symbolic transformations. After the ,, revolution,
Cubans turned in large numbers from suits and ties to the guayabera and other
local fashions. At the same time, local words were either invented or restored so
that Americanisms could be dropped (such as jardinero for a home run in baseball).
Even holidays were transformedthe gure of Don Feliciano came to replace
the Christmas tree and Santa Claus.
;o
Politically, economically and symbolically,
revolutions stand for the systemic transformation of domestic orders.
A states international relations are also transformed after a revolution. Indeed,
the international enects endure long after the initial ame of revolution has been
extinguished. For example, the Bolsheviks Decree on Peace in November ,;
called for revolution throughout Europe and Asia, and was sustained by a a million
rouble fund to support international revolution. Although the short-term success
of the Bolsheviks in fostering revolution was slight, by ,o a third of humanity
;a
Hobsbawm, Revolution, p. a,.
;,
George Lawson, Negotiated revolutions (London: Ashgate, aoo), p. ;,.
;,
Cited in Christopher Hill, The century of revolution (London: Routledge, aooa; rst publ. ,o), p. o.
;
Jenery Paige, Finding the revolutionary in the revolution, in Foran, ed., Future of revolution, p. a,.
;o
Paige, Finding the revolutionary, p. a,.
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lived under regimes which took their inspiration from the Russian Revolution;
a tsarist empire covering one-sixth the area of the globe had been disbanded
and put back together. In comparable vein, Cuba provided troops for liberation
movements from Algeria to Nicaragua, as well as technical support to a number of
allied states around the world. And for its part, the Iranian revolutionary regime
meddled repeatedly in regional anairs, sending around ,ooo revolutionary guards
to Lebanon in ,a, and gifting over $oo million to Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad and
other militant Shii groups. The regime mobilized Shii organizations in Sudan,
Egypt, Algeria and Tunisia in the interests of sudur-i inqilab (the export of revolu-
tion), while Iranian omcials used forums as varied as international congresses and
the hajj as a means of spreading their revolutionary message.
;;
However, as noted above, the impact of revolutionary regimes on the inter-
national system rarely matches the rhetoric of either their supporters or their
opponents. Not only has Iran, for example, failed to provide support for Chechen
rebels ghting the Russians, the regime backed the Armenians against the Shii
Azeris in Nagorno-Karabakh, the Americans against the USSR in Afghanistan
and the Chinese against Muslim insurgents in Xinjiang. Soviet internationalism
was similarly uneven in both design and impact. Indeed, splits within the left
often arose precisely over the issue of internationalism, whether in Soviet distaste
for Cuban adventurism or in specic debates over Soviet non-intervention in
the Spanish Civil War in the ,,os and the invasion of Czechoslovakia in ,o.
The weakness and pragmatism of revolutionary states on the one hand, and the
strength of counter-revolutionary forces on the other, serve to inhibit the spread
of revolution.
Whither revolution?
These ideal-typical anatomies of revolutionary situations, trajectories and
outcomes extend Fred Hallidays contribution to the study of revolutions by
seeking to improve links between the examination of specic cases and broader
theoretical claims. They also supplement Hallidays understanding of revolution
in three ways: rst, by highlighting the ways in which revolutions are crucial
to the development of international order; second, by sustaining an intersocial
approach which conjoins international and domestic events; and third, by seeing
revolution as a exible rather than xed category of analysis. It is the associa-
tion of revolution with inalienable characteristics (in particular, violence) which
led many commentators to claim that revolutions were irrelevant to a world in
which the big issues of governance and economic development had been settled.
;

However, the events of ao, as Fred Halliday would have been the rst to recog-
nize, have reminded observers of what should have been obvious all along: that
;;
Mark Katz, Revolution and revolutionary waves (New York: St Martins, ,,;); Asef Bayat, Is there a future for
Islamist revolutions?, in Foran et al., eds, Revolution in the modern world, pp. ,o.
;
See e.g. Robert Snyder, The end of revolution?, Review of Politics o: , ,,,, p. o; Ghia Nodia, The end of
revolution?, Journal of Democracy : , aooo, p. ;o.
George Lawson
o,
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because revolutions are dynamic processes which change according to the context
in which they emerge, they remain of signicance both to contemporary societies
and to broader dynamics of international order.
If there was little doubt that revolutions would occupy a central place in the
contemporary world, there was a more open question as to the form they would
take. Here the issue is more vexed. For all the demonstrations against autocratic
regimes, for all the student protests, food riots and other forms of contempo-
rary revolutionary contestation, there is less sense today than in the pre-,, era
as to the collective goal of these struggles. Fred Halliday shared this reservation.
Although convinced that the exploitation, oppression, inequality and waste of the
contemporary world left states vulnerable to challenges from below, Halliday was
hostile to many forms of contemporary resistance, describing them as a fungible
crew of ruckus societies, windbags and conspiracy theorists.
;,
Hallidays assess-
ment was clearhe considered contemporary insurgents to be utopian without
a concomitant sense of realism, guilty of amnesia towards the history of revolu-
tionary success and failure, and holding, at best, a fuzzy conception of revolu-
tionary agency.
o
Halliday may or may not have been right in this assessment. But the anti-
globalization movement of movements he saw as central to contemporary
revolutionary protests makes up only one of four revolutionary currents in the
contemporary world. A second strand lies in the persistent capacity of pre-,,
revolutionary statesChina, Cuba and Iran above allto punch above their
weight in international anairs. Revolution is a central feature of these states self-
conception. As such, many of their activities, both domestic and international, can
be examined through the anatomies surveyed in this article. A third current exists
in concrete instances of revolutionary protest, such as the ao Arab Spring, which
share some overlaps with previous cases of revolution.

The fourthand most

importantdimension of revolution in the contemporary world is the challenge
prompted by the two most powerful utopian visions of the current conjuncture:
liberalism and Islamism. The former, a viewpoint Halliday came increasingly to
embrace, combines assumptions about progress as resulting from the freedom
(founded on the idea of the purposive, autonomous, rights-bearing individual)
generated by the rationality of market exchange (as embodied in the concept
of private property) and government by consent (as constituted in representa-
tive democracy). It is the core transformative project in the contemporary world.
The latter, which borrows much of its rhetoric and techniques from past revolu-
tionary movements, is, to a great extent, conceived in opposition to liberalism.
a

Like liberalism, Islamism was also a political ideology Halliday knew much about,
although without comparable levels of sympathy. The conict between these two
revolutionary utopias tells us much about both the contemporary shape of inter-
national relations and the challenges that are to come. Their judicious assessment,
;,
Fred Halliday, Getting real about Seattle, Millennium: Journal of International Studies a,: , aooo, pp. a,,.
o
Fred Halliday, The challenge for revolution in our times, in Foran, ed., Future of revolution, pp. ,oo,o,.

Lawson, Anatomies of revolution, ch. o.

a
Lawson, Anatomies of revolution, ch. o.
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alongside the other ways in which revolution continues to play a central role in
world anairs, would have been the subject of Fred Hallidays keen interest. His
reections on the subject are sorely missed.